Picone Painting Blog

How to Maintain Paint Supplies

Let’s be honest, when it comes to painting, it can be a costly project. It doesn’t matter if you are doing it on your own and paying for yourself or you have hired a house painter and they bring their own supplies like ladders, painters tape, painter’s tarps, brushes, etc. This can still be pretty costly project so when it comes to things like storing paint brushes, storing paint rollers, cleaning them well enough and properly, it’s an important step – as important as painting the room or space itself. Unfortunately, not a lot of people take care of their painting supplies. They might use it once for a room, throw it away and the next project that comes up they buy everything all over again. No, if you want to save money – keep everything and clean it accordingly. Below are some tips and tricks to help clean your supplies correctly, store them and much more.

Ragged Roller Edges

You know the deal – you bought these really fancy paint rollers that aren’t supposed to give you ragged roller edges, but they did anyway. How do you fix something like this? IS it fixable? Thankfully it is! Ragged edges happen when you either buy a cheap roller or when you use it a lot for something like a bigger spacious room. It’s just something that happens unfortunately. Thankfully, all you have to do with those tiny beads of dried paint on the edge of the roller is grab yourself some scissors and… Cut it off. Really; this is as simple as it gets. No frustration, no stress, no throwing it out! Just cut it off with a really sharp pair of scissors.

Stubborn Paint

When paint dries on certain objects, it can become a stubborn mess. For example, take paint brushes, they have those metal or plastic coatings on the side, front and back of the brush. Paint gets on it and it dries and you are wondering what in the world you are supposed to do. You can use paint remover – but paint remover is really strong and overpowering when it comes to the smell and it can be toxic, especially important if you have kids or pets in the house. Instead, get yourself a golf ball brush. These brushes cost a few bucks; the one side is a soft black brush, the other side is a brass brush that tends to be more ferocious! The soft black brush is great for rubbing that paint off the metal or plastic wrap around the brush, but it can also be used on the paint brush itself to get paint off the bristles. The brass brush is good for when you need an extra bit of elbow grease – don’t use the brass brush on the paint brush though, it’s too delicate to deal with the brass brush. Whew, say that 4 times fast!

Don’t Leave It Hanging Around

Be honest, when you are done painting, how long do your wait before you actually clean the brush out? A few minutes? A few hours? A day? If you take the brush right after its done being used, you can actually save 2 times the amount of money you spent on it. If you let it dry until it gets all crusty and hard, you will have to throw it out. But, like any residential house painter will tell you, if you take a newspaper and use the brush against it, you can remove most of the paint from the brush. Then, you can take a warm bucket of water, and swish the brush around and get around 98% of the paint off of it. Then all you have to do is give it a quick bath under the faucet and you should be able to get all the paint off.

Roller Washer

Personally, I think that paint brushes are easy to clean, it’s the rollers I always had a problem with. Thankfully, I had a residential house painter Morristown give me a tip – it’s a product called Roller Washer. Yes, this is a gimmick but it really works! This is for people that used premium rollers for their project. Premium rollers tend to be anywhere from $10 to $40. Crazy right? Well, if you bought it for that much, chances are you won’t want to just throw the roller or the nap away. But, I think most people will agree that naps tend to really suck paint up which means they take longer to clean… until now. A roller washer connects to the hose. The hose connects to your faucet. Once you get that connected you can place the tube from the roller washer over the roller and turn the water on. It flushes the roller cover out including the roller and the nap and gets rid of paint in just under 5 minutes. Pretty cool and a nice cheat!